Clean Energy Capacity Is Booming: “As the nation’s electricity infrastructure ages and older power plants retire, renewable energy is becoming the option of choice to power 21st Century America…Renewable energy already constitutes nearly 20% of U.S. electricity capacity across both red and blue states. Cumulative renewable capacity in the U.S. now totals nearly 222 gigawatts, with more than 17 gigawatts added to the grid just last year.”

Renewables Are Beating Fossil Fuel-Generated Power: “Since 2008, renewables have made up more than half of all new power generation capacity in the U.S., outcompeting fossil sources of electricity and delivering tangible economic benefits throughout the country.”

Clean Energy is a Major Source of Economic Growth and Job Creation: “With more than $380 billion in private sector investment since 2004, including over $44 billion in 2015 alone, renewable energy is an important source of American economic growth and job creation… with hundreds of manufacturing facilities and nearly 300,000 American workers, employment in just the wind and solar industries now surpasses jobs in coal mining and oil and gas extraction.”

Renewable Energy Costs Continue to Plummet: “Since 2009, the cost of wind energy has declined by more than 60% and the cost of solar power has declined by more than 80%.” As a result, “electric power prices are rising most slowly in the states with the most renewable energy, and most rapidly in the states with the least renewable power.”

Renewable Energy is an Important Asset for U.S. National Security: “[H]arness[ing] these abundant domestic resources promotes the nation’s energy independence and security by reducing our reliance on global fossil fuel markets, enhancing the resilience of our power grid, and increasing the long-term reliability of our electricity supply.”

Four Important Federal, State Policies Needed to Keep This Going: 1) create/maintain “a level playing field” for clean energy in the U.S. tax code; 2) implement the Clean Power Plan; 3) modernize the U.S. power grid; 4) reduce “inefficiencies in the federal permitting process” for renewable energy projects.

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We agree with the conclusion reached by PV Magazine, that although growth in renewable power in the United States is increasingly driven by non-RPS factors, "[t]his does not mean that RPS policies are not important."

Here are some key points from a new study by the Brattle Group for NRDC, entitled "Advancing Past 'Baseload' to a Flexible Grid," which argues that far from being a problem, a higher share of clean energy is actually a great opportunity for a wide variety of reasons.

In sum, the future looks extremely bright for clean energy, and for cleantech more broadly. The question isn't whether these sectors will grow rapidly, but simply how rapidly they'll grow. On that, we'd argue that EIA is far too conservative (or pessimistic, if you prefer), while BNEF is quite possibly too conservative as well, although they appear to be much closer to the mark than EIA's typically bearish-on-renewables, bullish-on-fossil-fuels forecasts.

According to a new report by the Energy Storage Association (ESA) and GTM Research, the U.S. energy storage industry is on fire, having just "deployed 71 MW of energy storage in Q1 2017...up 276% from the 18.9 MW deployed in Q1 2016," and with a lot more growth on the way.

See below for video of Chris Brown of Vestas, keynoting the opening session on day two of WINDPOWER 2017, concluding today in Anaheim, CA. According to Brown, who is completing his tenure as Chair of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the next five years will be the "best five years of your life" for the wind power industry.

But wind and other major cleantech sectors rely on distribution-only or distribution-mostly strategies that leave most of the marketing communications (“marcom”) power of these tools on idle. This year, we looked at why that happens. A few external drivers explain a lot.